The Washington Post clearly feels they have a live one, and are following up. Here’s the newest update:
Words Banned at Multiple HHS Agencies Include “Diversity” and “Vulnerable”
I was expecting this, because someone on another platform had posted a list of instances in which the Seven Forbidden Words had been used in earlier CDC budget documents and some of them ( “fetus” for instance) hadn’t appeared in them in years. I thought, “I bet this list has been distributed to a lot of other agencies.” And lo:
A second HHS agency received similar guidance to avoid using “entitlement,” “diversity” and “vulnerable,” according to an official who took part in a briefing earlier in the week. Participants at that agency were also told to use “Obamacare” instead of ACA, or the Affordable Care Act, and to use “exchanges” instead of “marketplaces” to describe the venues where people can purchase health insurance.
This is only to be expected, really; one of the first things that emerged about this administration was that they were trying to scrub the phrase “climate change” off the face of the earth, or at least out of government documents. In a way, all the CDC story does is prove that the rot is spreading. But there’s something about the list of words–apart from the ominous inclusion of “transgender” as The Identity Which Shall Not Be Named–that I think just captures the annihilating absurdity at the heart of this administration.
When I first read the story I had two simultaneous reactions: 1) Holy shit this is terrifying and 2) Jesus Christ, these people are children.
Both are true. This banning of particular words is, on the one hand, a very serious thing with potentially very serious consequences. And it is also just fucking ridiculous.
And it is also familiar. The belief that you can eradicate something just by stopping people from talking about it is one of the most common delusions shared by right-wing evangelical Christians. It is also shared by autocrats and dictators and, you know, Stalin, whose regime inspired most of the creepiest stuff in 1984. But this is why, for instance, the Christian right always loses its shit whenever anyone brings up anything relating to LGBT identity In Front of the Children–because if we would only stop talking about it, the next generation wouldn’t learn about it, and then it would Go Away. I suppose this belief persists partly because if you work hard enough at it you can sort of make it seem true by forcing the evidence of whatever it is you don’t like–gay people, trans people, climate change–out of the public domain. It does matter when you create conditions where people don’t know how to name who they are. Or when you create conditions where government agencies are not allowed to ask for money to protect those people.
But over the long term, it never works. And that’s because there is a level at which reality persists regardless of discourse. The planet’s temperature will go on rising no matter how often we use the phrase “climate change.” The vulnerable will remain vulnerable–indeed, one imagines that more and more people will become vulnerable as this administration drags on. Transgender people will continue to be, and be out, and be loved and valued by those who are not assholes.
Censorship, in the end, is not suppression but harassment. It is a form of persecution; it never destroys the targeted information or concepts or words or whatever, it just punishes those who use it. In fact, the first consequence of banning something is always to provoke people to seek it out, so the information actually multiplies (I haven’t checked, but I bet every one of the Seven Words is right now trending on Twitter). But this is a specific kind of censorship: at least as far as the CDC employees were told, it applies only to budget documents. In other words, the purpose of this censorship is to ensure that the budget Buttercup’s administration will one day submit to Congress does not include any of these words. And apparently, they didn’t want this to be publicized; so it was not an attempt to influence public discourse. The goal seems to have been to purge the Verba Non Grata from their vision of how the government will spend its money in the year to come.
So it is very sinister–the piece I linked to above talks about the real problems this is potentially going to cause for the fight against AIDS; and again, this is all coming from the same fuckers who didn’t want to talk about AIDS and didn’t want anyone else educating people about how to have sex without transmitting the virus. (One of the fiats that has come down attempts to redefine “sex education” as “sexual risk avoidance,” elsewhere defined as what they used to call abstinence-only sex education, back in the days before Newspeak.) It’s dangerous. It’s going to do damage.
And yet, I stand by my other reaction as well: These people are children. They believe in magic. They think they will make it so by saying that it is so. They think that if they can’t see something that means it’s gone. They think that if you tell people they can’t use one word, they won’t be able to find another that conveys the same meaning. Like all censors, they fundamentally don’t understand language and can’t imagine how robust, resilient, creative, and polymorphous it is. Which actually now that I think about it is something that a lot of children understand and kind of love playing with, so maybe this comparison is not fair to children.
God, the smallness of the people who did this. The narrow gauge of their vision, the shrunkenness of their tongues, the painful impactions of their tiny imploded hearts. Buttercup has surrounded himself with people who are as terrified and hateful as he is. I would pity them if they weren’t trying to remake the world in their image.
The seven words are indeed trending on twitter. #sevenwords
It’s Not Just 7 Words, And It’s Not Just The CDC.
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